HP Pavilion Gaming Laptop: Affordable gaming with caveats

HP’s Pavilion Gaming Laptop may seem like a relic from years past, given the rise of HP’s Omen line. Granted, the Pavilion line lacks Omen’s “For Gamers, By Gamers” cred, but…well, what’s in a name, really? The Pavilion Gaming Laptop is just an Omen in disguise, an entry-level peer with mainstream branding.

VARIANTS

The pricing is mainstream, too. The Pavilion Gaming Laptop starts at just $640 for a base Pavilion 15t model on hp.com, with Intel Core i5-9300H and a last-gen GTX 1050. The model we received is essentially HP’s “high-end” unit, the poetically named 15-dk0045cl, a $1,250 version sold at Costco and equipped with an Intel Core i7-9750H, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, a 256GB M.2 SSD, and a 1TB HDD. It’s a good deal. If you’re not a Costco member, an identical model based on the Pavilion Gaming Laptop 15t at hp.com costs $1,440. The similar Pavilion 15-dk0046nr is available with a Core i7-9750H, 12GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD, and a step down in graphics to Nvidia’s GTX 1650.